SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research project will demonstrate a novel membrane inlet for cone penetrometers instrumented for chemical detection in soil and groundwater. Cone penetrometers are now used to understand site geology at remediation sites. Cone penetrometers equipped with chemical sensors will reduce site remediation costs by allowing the currently required geophysical stuty to be combined with a chemical survey. This will minimize the number of expensive wells required. Further, chemical analyses, now routinely done in the laboratory at significant expense, will be done in the field. Field engineers will be able to make remediation decisions in real time at minimum cost. Recent efforts to instrument cone penetrometers have used large sophisticated laser systems which send light underground through fiber optic cable and return the signal to the surface for analysis. These systems can cost $250,000. This research will develop a membrane inlet for cone penetrometers which will make it possible to instrument a cone penetrometer with inexpensive, in-situ, chemical vapor sensors with a projected system cost of under $10,000. The phase I objective is to demonstrate a membrane inlet in the laboratory with typical chemicals found in remediation sites. The overall program objective is to built and demonstrate a fully operational cone penetrometer system at two remediation sites.

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will demonstrate the feasibility of two cone penetrometers chemical detection systems. These systems have the potential to reduce the cost of remediation site characterization, which is currently estimated at over $400 billion in the United States, by 25%. This cost savings will be achieved by using chemical sensor-equipped cone penetrometers in place of the expensive soil boring and well monitoring processes currently used to characterize remediation sites. The Phase I effort demonstrated the feasibility of a membrane inlet assembly for cone penetrometers. The Phase II effort will demonstrate the feasibility of combining the membrane inlet assembly with two types of chemical sensors capable of detecting volatile organic hydrocarbons (VOCs). Prototype detection systems will be fabricated, calibrated in the laboratory, and then tested using standard cone penetrometer rigs at actual contaminated sites. The performance of the cone penetrometer sensors will be correlated with the results of EPA-approved analytical techniques. Two products are expected to result from this research. The first is a system which can measure the concentration of both chlorinated and non-chlorinated hydrocarbons in soil in real time. The second is an adapter which permits one to mount a miniature gas chromatograph in a cone penetrometer.